~religion~

I grew up in an unincorporated rural community nobody has heard of, tucked away in the woods, a ~20 minute drive in either direction before you got to a city. My family were mostly mechanics with a side of home farming. I moved around a lot through rural Maryland and Pennsylvania, experiencing PA Dutch culture around me in addition to our family's detached German Romani culture (I say "German Romani" and not Sinti if only because I'm still unclear on exact vitsa details, though we do have Sitari connections.) I lived most of the good parts of my childhood with my great grandmother, grandfather, great aunt, mother, and a lot of regularly-visiting cousins of all distances, aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, and aunts and uncles who I'm not even sure were blood related but were family anyway. I even got to meet my great-great granny and celebrate her 100th birthday with her before she passed away.

All this to give context for the magic I've always done. See -- at my great great granny's viewing, I remember I wasn't scared or upset at all, not even when I saw her body in the casket. On the contrary, I did something interesting and pulled out a stick of gum and a penny and laid it in her casket before I gave her a kiss on the cheek. "So she'll have food and money in Heaven," I reasoned. Nobody had taught me this, and everyone thought it was just a cute kid thing, but looking back I see what I really did.

Before I was anything else, I was a folk witch. I carried around big sticks and made dirt potions and climbed trees and played with cicadas. When I was old enough to go in the woods by myself, I learned about the fair folk and forest spirits there. I learned that you throw an acorn cap over the hill before you enter, and you always pick up any trash you find on the way out. I learned they were fond of tricks and getting people lost for laughs if you weren't careful and courteous. Cryptids and local folklore like the goat man and pig lady were my bread and butter (ask me about weapon-weilding, bridge-guarding animal-people in American folklore sometime), and ghost stories were how I made sense of a lot of my early experiences with hearing voices and astral travel.

Before glueing herself to a Catholic, my mother was even a witch for a while (though I give her little credit in my development.) I remember playing with her tarot and oracle decks, learning divination as I layed out the cards in front of me and studied them. I'd read her books on magic and practice the visualization exercises and spells. I had out of body experiences, traveled in my dreams, and had a wicked intuition I've had to un-repress in recent years. My life was full of magic, even hidden as we had to keep it from my great grandmother.

So despite my mother trying to convert us to Catholicism with my (ex-)Step Dad when I was a pre-teen, I found Wicca in a library like 2 years of trying to do the Catholic thing and ditched, but still had to hide what I was doing and learned to recognize other forms of hidden magic. Barn stars and hex signs suddenly made a new kind of sense, I found Goddess in the Mother Mary and power in the Saints, but always I had something else under that which I had to hide in the everyday. From Neo-Wicca, I dabbled across paths and mostly remained Wiccan-esque, until I was a solid Lokean in my late teens into my early 20s. I have since renounced that path due to a number of negative experiences in the community.

These days, though, I've found myself in the House of Netjer following Kemetic Orthodoxy. Gyralagoss and were divined as* children of Wesir and Set, Beloved of Sekhmet-Mut, Heru-wer, Amun-Ra, and Djehuty. I also have strong feelings about Hethert (in Her many forms), Nit-Nebthet-Seshat, and Aset-Serqet. Despite having the same lineup, however, we get different faces of the same gods, and I'll elaborate on my own iru here at some point.

Another part of my path, thanks to Magen and the complicated relationship of culture to our system, involves Judaism and connecting to indigenous MENA traditions belonging to Jews. I'm deeply interested in the archaeological history of the ancient Israelites and how they came about as tribes, and I feel like Caananite religion also syncretises in some way with my Kemetic path, building an odd bridge between them. Jewish values, culture, and philosophy pepper my life in rich and important ways I just could never ignore.

Most recently, I've learned about the Romani origins of our family (it explained a lot), and have been re-/connecting to that how I can. It led me to Sarah Kali, and through her to Kali Maa. In order to approach Her in Her actual cultural context, I began learning from Nishanth Selvalingam. He's a wonderful teacher, and I've found concepts of non-Duality to make so much sense thanks to his explanations. Non-dualism feels like it encompasses everything else I experience and believe, now, and it's been a rich evolution in my spiritual life.

On the side, I maintain a loose sort of religious/magical connection to being Lloth, as Wix, and have a divine polymorph nature to myself-as-a-whole. A lot of my alterhuman and witch experience these days revolves around dream and astral traveling, spirit mediumship, and herbalism. Being narcoleptic is something that contributes to this, something I view as being "on call" for the Dreaming world. Likewise, the experience of being a Voice Hearer, whether those voices are spirits or internal parts or headmates or whatever, is also a deeply spiritual experience that has been with me my whole life, and informed a lot of my worldview. All these little things add up, despite not necessarily fitting into a nice story like the rest of what I could convey here.

*Rite of Parent divination applies 1 per body, for everyone in it. Which means that all this applies to our whole system. This is something that we've seen talked out with the Nisut, Rev. Dr. Siuda, and are okay with because of the nature of the way RPD lineups work and the effort involved in service. Not all plurans might like this, and we didn't know how to feel at first, but I might write someday on why I think it works for us and how the gods came through for us anyway.